


One Breath

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [34]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alien Abduction, F/M, Hospitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:58:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4621032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would do anything, if it would bring her back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Breath

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 2.08 "One Breath"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

He dreamed he was touching her tombstone, tracing the letters of her name. The edges of the stone cut into his skin. He pressed his fingertips to his lips and tasted blood. 

He started awake. He'd bitten the inside of his lip. Mulder sighed and turned on the television. There was already a tape in the VCR. Porn, with its mechanical predictability, functioned much like Plan 9 From Outer Space, occupying just enough of his attention that his mind was free to wander. There had to be something. There had to be a clue he hadn't found.

The phone rang and suddenly the pieces of his life fell back into place, like footage of glass shattering being rewound. Scully would have told him that entropy increased in a system as time progressed, but the clock ticked on and he had his miracle all the same. 

(He loved her. He had known it before, distantly, like a memory from Oxford, but he felt it more surely with every second that ticked past as he sped to the hospital. Two years together and he had been like the proverbial frog, slowly reaching the boiling point until he bubbled over in a froth of despairing adoration when he had woken up in a world she no longer inhabited. He had tried to forget. But the heart that had been ripped out when she was taken was returned to him and he felt its absence retrospectively. He couldn't swear there had been blood in his veins for the last few months, but now, his limbs tingled painfully, as if they'd fallen asleep during her absence and woken up all at once. He loved her. He couldn't say what shape it took. He hardly dared to examine it for fear that it might turn out to be some twisted, monstrous thing; his other relationships had had dark roots and things that went bump in the night. He might never tell her, but he knew it for himself.) 

She looked small in the narrow bed, but not thin. Whatever had happened to her, she had not been starved. There were no marks on her pale skin, but her eyes had bruisy circles under them. When he touched her hand, her fingers felt cool. She did not curl her fingers into his. She just kept breathing, her chest rising and falling. He wondered why they hadn't covered her. She looked like she must be cold. He wanted to shift her gently, to pull the blankets over her and tuck her in. Maybe if they covered her up, she would turn instinctively onto her side and tug the blankets over her shoulder. Maybe she would wake up.

Nobody had any answers. But Maggie let him sit in as if he were family, and the ounce of him that wasn't furious was grateful. He remembered the day he'd signed Scully's living will. He'd been surprised that she asked him.

"You're likely to be the person who has to make that decision, Mulder," she'd said, looking at him steadily. "I hope you'll consider creating a will of your own."

"I've always had a will of my own, Scully," he'd teased, and gotten out his nice pen to sign his name.

"I'm serious," she had said. "This is a serious matter."

"You're my doctor, Scully," he'd told her. "I trust you to make the call, documentation or no."

"I hope it never comes to that," she'd said. "But I appreciate your faith in me."

"Always," he'd said.

He had not deserved her faith in him but she was there, she was real, and her heart still beat a steady rhythm. That was enough for the moment. He had something to fight for. If there was a cure for whatever they had done to her, he would find it.

\+ + + + 

The lake spread around her like peace. The boat bobbed gently up and down and she was so very weary. Melissa stood on the dock with her hands extended. Mulder stood next to her, glowering in that familiar way. Scully could reach out to them, but it was easier not to, easier just to sit and wait and let the water rock her.

\+ + + + 

He waited in his apartment for hours, gazing at the X taped on his window. 

Nothing. 

The Gunmen, less sophisticated, had more answers. Mulder found he was oddly charmed by Frohike's visit: the suit, the flowers, the uncharacteristic bashfulness. It was, after all, remotely plausible that Scully was hot, and more than remotely plausible, but there was something very sweet about the way Frohike clutched the flowers. 

"Do you think she'll be able to smell them?" he asked as the nurse went to find a vase.

"I don't know," Mulder said, picking up the charts from the end of her bed, "but someone might. Take these."

Frohike stuffed the papers into his trousers without even raising an eyebrow. 

They pored over her charts together, ran the data, crunched the numbers. They called in help, like some kind of hacker bat signal. But all they could tell him was that there was nothing to be done.

That was unacceptable. He had always been prone to solve his problems with his fists when wit failed; he relished the chance to get his hands on someone. Anyone. If she was dying, his own life meant nothing. A lost boy couldn't go home. A man who feared nothing might find what he sought. 

(Maggie knew. Melissa knew. There was something about the Scully women that went right through him. They looked at him and saw his soul laid bare. They knew things about him he had not known. He wanted to bow his head before them and receive their blessing. Melissa was angry with him for not participating in the process, as if she had appointed herself his therapist and prescribed him a healthy dose of appropriate grief. Where Scully would have planted her feet and raised her eyebrow, Melissa spoke sharply; she wouldn't give him an inch. But the only path he had left was spattered with blood. He would take it, if it would bring her back. He would do anything, if it would bring her back.)

\+ + + + 

Nurse Owen's hair was as dark as Mulder, but where Mulder had a heart like a coal, Nurse Owens' was as peaceful as the lake.

The dock seemed closer when Nurse Owens spoke. Moving seemed possible. She thought of Mulder and his anger. He would need her. She did not want to watch him burn himself up. But she didn't move.

The water sloshed around the boat, somnolent. The rope frayed and snapped. She watched impassively as the dock drifted away.

And after the dock, logically, there was her father. After the boat, the captain. He stood in the light, luminous in his whites. She could see him even with her eyes closed.

She had always followed his orders. She let Nurse Owens drew her gently back, over the water and through the woods.

\+ + + + 

Skinner was no help. Mister X was no help. The Cigarette Smoking Man was no help. He loathed himself for his helplessness.

Without Scully, he couldn't do this anymore. 

There was always the chance of another miracle. He was not the sort of man who prayed, but he touched the cross he still wore around his neck and sent his despair into the universe. Scully, of all people, didn't deserve this. He would offer himself on the altar if he knew where it was. 

X gave him a gift that he wanted to accept, but Melissa wrested it away from him. Scully was more important than vengeance. If she lived, they could pursue that avenue together. If. If. If. 

He went to her. He sat by her bed. He spoke to her. It was all he could do. 

And she woke up. His apartment was in shambles and his heart was in pieces but the phone rang and she woke up and he was made new.

He brought her a stupid gift, because he could not give her his heart. By the sweetness of her smile, he thought that she understood. It broke him all over again that her first thought was for the evidence, for the X-Files, as if any of it mattered next to her. 

"I had the strength of your beliefs," she said, and he could not speak.


End file.
